While reading Don Juan I found myself confused with the placement of the narrator within his subject. By this, I mean whether he is part of or separated from his subject via time; whether he is looking to the past to tell his story, or whether he is part of it himself.
The first inkling of the narrator's relation to the tale comes in the very first stanza of the piece and sets Don Juan in the past. In line six, the narrator describes his protagonist as "our ancient friend Don Juan," which seems paradoxical. "[A]ncient" suggests that Don Juan existed long in the past, before the modern era, and thus separates the narrator from him, yet the second descriptor "friend" relays some sort of intimacy between narrator and subject which could not exist over the grand scope of time denoted by "ancient." Thus from the outset, the narrator leaves us on unstable ground.
Where I became most aware of my confusion, was when the narrator placed himself in the story itself in stanzas 23 and 24. Not only does this choice seem unnecessary in terms of the narrative (the narrator seems to be able to infer and describe plenty without being inside the story) but also confuses the timing of the occurrence further. We can now as readers redeem the term "friend" from the first stanza, but "ancient" feels like a misnomer if the actual reality of the story happened in the direct past of the narrator. On top of this, Byron as author makes no attempt to remedy this discrepancy. How can something be ancient and contemporary? What is gained from the narrator being placed in the narrative itself, and not at the outset might I add? All of these questions seem pertinent not to the resonance of the piece, but to its consistency and coherence.
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